


Kowloon feint

by JaqofSpades



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: 1920s AU, F/M, a stab at noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 12:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9727433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: The scandalous Miss Mao, they call her.  Hong Kong’s most notorious flapper.  Daddy’s runaway princess.  Found.  Just like he promised.  End of story, right?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nourgelitnius (Ladysarah)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladysarah/gifts).



> For The Expanse Shipper's Valentine's Day exchange. nourgelitnius asked only for a historical or modern AU: I chose Roaring 20s Hong Kong. With a dose of prewar gumshoe noir. Sadly, neither Valentine's Day or much in the way of shippiness decided to participate. (And that wordcount thingy - that was a minimum, right?)

 

Miller finds her in the darkest hole Kowloon has to offer.

Deep in the Walled City, she’s just another laundry girl darting through the mazelike streets in a ragged smock and peasant’s headscarf.  She’s half hidden behind a teetering pile of folded linens, but neither the shadows or a generous helping of dirt can disguise the exquisite angles of her face.  Her hands would still be soft, too, and under that headwrap, he’d bet on finding a sharp-cut cap of blue-black hair.  Probably never done laundry in her life, Juliette Mao.  She might have been a half-caste in a city that hated them, but her Daddy’s money had smoothed her path plenty. Until now.

The scandalous Miss Mao, they call her.  Hong Kong’s most notorious flapper.  Daddy’s runaway princess.  Found.  Just like he promised, and he’s a man who keeps his promises, Josephus Aloysius Miller. 

Miller snorts at his own hubris.  Sometimes.  Maybe.  If they pay him enough.  He’s a venal bastard, but when the work counts, they can count on him to get it done.  And right now, he should be calling this done. 

He still has questions, though.  It should have been an easy hunt.  A day or two at most.  How in all the hells did this slip of a girl manage to elude him for more than a month?  Sure, he’d finessed it at first, but by the second week – he’d prowled through her empty apartment, again and again.  Sifted through all the debris of high society.  Stared at the photographs contemplating the teasing smile that plays around her mouth, at odds with those uncompromising black eyes.  She’s a puzzle, Miss Juliette.

Jules-Pierre Mao hadn’t even known his precious eldest daughter was back on the island.  He’d sent her to France to perfect his mother tongue and practise her watercolours, and somehow she’d fallen in with intellectuals.  The fastidious _taipan_ had shuddered as he handed over a sheaf of letters testifying to the girl’s preoccupation with radical ideas, names like Voltaire and Saint-Simon and then, the really dangerous ones.  Sun Yat-Sen, and Chiang Kai-Shek, and others Jules Pierre Mao hadn’t known enough to worry about.

Miller had, though.  He’d been monitoring the Chinese nationalist factions for years now, the colonial administration terrified by the crumbling order on the mainland.  Change was coming to Hong Kong, and it was Miller’s job to keep the high mucky-mucks informed about the way the wind might be set to blow.

And to think he thought he was wasting his time tracking down the runaway daughter of the colony’s richest citizen.

“The more Mao owes us, the better,” Shaddid had said.  “Get it done quick.”

But no one had reckoned on Juliette Mao being hard to find.  And that was before he’d figured out he wasn’t the only one looking for her. 

He’d spotted the tail last week.  Two of Ho Fun’s goons.  They sure as hell weren’t meddling in politics, so he figures there’s only one other reason to be following him.  But why would the island’s most notorious crime gang be looking for Mao’s daughter?

He’d put it to the taipan, but Jules Pierre Mao is a better liar than he’ll ever be, so Miller asks about her friends, her hobbies, her favourite places in the city.   Gets enough to make a start – the Race Club, and a debutante in love with going fast in fancy motorcars.   Clearly more money than sense.

“Bring her home to me,” the taipan had begged, and it could almost have been sincerity shining in his eyes.  “She is little more than a child, and has no idea how cruel the world can be.”

No child, Miller thinks now, keeping close to the alley wall as he ambles in slow pursuit.  Somehow, Hong Kong’s most glittering jewel has all the skills of a seasoned spy.  Miller finds himself wondering if she’s a coquette, too, or if there could be a man behind this.  She’s 22, after all.  Old enough for a lover, young enough to choose disastrously.   Is that what this is?

He makes the enquiries discreetly, but they prove fruitless.  When he finds her bolthole, he’s inexplicably pleased that she’s been living alone.  He can’t find it in himself to ask about any callers. He has the information he needs.

Now for the distasteful bit.

He waits until the water for her bath is ordered up before approaching her apartment, Mr Wu on the ground floor having outlined her daily routine in return for a packet of Marlboros.  He enters noiselessly, and folds himself down at the rickety table to wait.  It’s a good plan, but it goes awry.

She smells of violets when she pads into the room, the silk robe fluttering about her calves, parting to reveal strong brown legs still glistening with stray drops of water.  Her hair is tousled about her face, and her coppery skin seems more naked than he’s ever seen a woman be, completely stripped of artifice.  She’s breathtaking, and he takes a moment too long just in the looking.

She has a knife at his throat her knee in his back before his brain registers the fact that she moved.

“Who are you?  Who do you work for?”

There had been no directive of secrecy for this job; just the assumption that he would find Juliette and bring her home.  So he’s happy to spill the beans.

“Joe Miller.  Star Helix Detective agency.  And your Dad.”

She snorts contemptuously.  “There’s no such person in my life.  You mean Jules Pierre Mao.”

Joe nods, acknowledging the correction.  Not his business, healing family feuds.

“Yes.  Mr Mao would like you to come home.”

“He’s asking nicely, is he?”

One advantage of having his face pushed into the floor is that she can’t see his wince, he discovers.  But the way she laughs, dry and sore and sorry, tells him it was never a genuine question.  She knows her father better than he ever will.

“He did ask me to tell you he would sell the Razorback and every other one of your toys if you didn’t return home immediately.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Standard kidnap order.”

“ah, Papa.  So loving.  I wonder how soon they want to hold the wedding.”

What wedding, Miller wants to ask, but he hates to admit being short of the facts.  So he groans instead, shifting about a little under her knee to test how serious she is about the restraint.

She shoves his crossed wrists upwards until his shoulder joints scream, and with her other hand scrapes her very serious knife over his stubbly neck.

“Don’t move, Mr Miller.  I don’t want to kill you by mistake.”

“Pretty sure I don’t want that either,” he assures her.  “How can we take a step towards not killing me? Your father isn’t paying me nearly enough for that.”

“I’m shocked,” Juliette snarks, but the knife eases away from his neck and the agonising push on his arms eases off.  She still has him pinned, but … she leans forward, soft breasts warm against his back, and whispers her offer.  “Don’t tell them you found me. Don’t tell anyone.”

“I could do that, but it won’t stop him.  He’ll just send someone else.  He’s pretty keen to get you back under his wing.”

“Under his thumb,” Juliette grates out.  “Or in this case, Ho Fun’s.  But I won’t do it.”

And there it is, Miller thinks, trying not to be distracted by the feel of her sliding off him.  The knife, he notices, came from a makeshift sheath under the table.  Neat trick, he thinks as he gingerly recovers his arms from the agonising stretch.  Then his brain clicks back on.

 “What can’t you do?”

“Be his whore.  Bought and paid for.  A respectable wife for the gangster prince.”

The wedding, Miller remembers.  “He’s forcing you to marry someone you don’t want to?”

Her raised eyebrow holds a whole lot of reproof.  “The day I let Ho Fun touch me is the day I slit his throat.  He first offered for me when I was nine years old.  You know what my father said then?”

Miller shakes his head, suddenly queasy.  No one expected their super rich clients to be good guys, but this …

“He said to wait until I’d bled.  Then I’d be ready for marriage.”

Miller’s belly churns at the memory of Jules Pierre Mao shaking his head in feigned sadness.  “My Julie, she’s a flibbertigibbet.  Been running away since she was 12 years old, but after her time in France, she stopped coming back.” 

Now he knows why.

“How you get out of it so far?”

“Told him I needed an education, if I was to be an asset to his family.  To be his hostess.  Mother to his grandsons.”  Her voice shakes with hatred.

“But time’s up?”

“They sent the old woman over to check my virginity last week. I climbed out the window into the street while they were bringing her up to my room.”

Her face is so livid that Miller knows not to touch that line of questioning with a barge pole. “So, I read somewhere that my contract is automatically voided by being commissioned to undertake illegal acts.  Guess it’s time to look at the fine print.”

Something twitches at the corner of Juliette Mao’s mouth.  It’s a good mouth, Miller can’t help noticing.  (So maybe he’s been noticing for weeks.  Maybe he noticed that very first day.  But a handful of pictures can’t hold a candle to this living, breathing, mesmerising witch of a woman.)

“I’ve got a proposition for you.”

She lays it out, and he finds himself helping.  Embroidering.  Layering in detail, just to see that reluctant curve of her lips.  The respect sparking in her eyes.  It’s all he’ll ever have from her, he knows that.  But it’s enough.

Maybe he’s a fool.  But he won’t be the first fool to call in a few favours for a beautiful girl.  And he's certainly not fool enough to turn his back on this one.

Because he’s got another suspicion about the terrifying Miss Mao.

*

The body is blackened and smoking, and it’s a miracle, really, that the fire didn’t take out the entire dosshouse. 

“Lucky escape,” Miller offers the landlord sympathetically, and then warns him the law might come poking round.  “She wasn’t who she said she was.”

She’ll never be that girl again.

Miller doffs his porkpie hat to deliver the news to her father.

“I’m so sorry, sir.  I didn’t get there in time.”

Jules-Pierre Mao is pale with sorrow, and Miller nearly buys it.  Right up until his secretary announces Mr Ho has arrived for his appointment.

Julie’s laughter has almost hysterical edge when he relates the scene.  “Poor daddy.  I wonder if he’ll escape with his life.  Ho Fun is a particularly bad loser.”

She’d won the Razorback from the gangster, Miller remembers.  She’d put up her own little roadster against the snarling Daimler, then scandalised the crowd by insisting on driving it herself.  She’d won, and the fastest car in Hong Kong had passed to her.

And now she’d turned her back on it.  Ah, politics.

“How was my sister?”

Clarissa Mao, Miller’s brain offers.  All of 15 years old.  He blanches.

“Didn’t see her,” he says carefully.  “Your father wouldn’t – tell me she’s not next in line.”  

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” the girl who was once Julie says.  She has contacts, this woman, names he pretends not to hear.  She’ll disappear into the masses on the mainland, and it will be another name he hears, when the inevitable revolution comes. 

He might not even be here.  They’re talking about war in Europe again, and if he’s anything, Josephus Miller is an old soldier.  He wouldn’t know how not to fight, and since he has a choice – he’d rather not be fighting her.

So he’s not going to ask her name, but he’ll knows he’ll hear it eventually.

Knows it will make him smile, and ache a little.

Cry, maybe.

Juliette Andromeda Mao.

In another place, another time – they could have been something.

_fin_


End file.
